Roy of the Rovers Monthly

Roy scores in the European Cup Final!

Back in 1993 I landed the job as artist on the relaunch of British comic icon Roy of the Rovers. Fleetway had given Stuart Green, the editor and writer, a green light to reinvent the strip and he asked me to provide the artwork. Previously Stuart and I had worked together on the ill-fated Glory Glory for Tundra UK and after its demise both of us had been kicking our heels wondering what to do next.

Cover to the sample issue 1 - the main image is by me, the smaller images are by Sean Longcroft and Warren Pleece.

Glory Glory was a fortnightly football anthology comic intended for the newstands. It combined gritty realism, surreal comedy and stylish football action. It was the brainchild of Stuart and Frank Plowright.

Stuart's plan was to bring the same sensibilities to Roy of the Rovers. His ideas were brilliant but ruthless. The original title had been cancelled in March 1993 and the story of Roy Race ended with Roy crashing his private helicopter, readers were left not knowing if he was alive or dead. In September of the same year our Monthly comic started up and Roy awoke from a coma to find that his comic strip world had gone and reality had moved in. The first shock was discovering that he had lost his famous left foot, amputated after the crash.

A very different iconic image of Roy Race, not your standard front cover image for a football comic. caused a bit of a stir with criticism from some disabled groups and a TV show even linking the image to a history of comics portraying people in wheel chairs as failures or evil vengeful monsters. We were simply trying to show Roy's true innate heroism in the way he overcomes the 'worst thing that could have happened'.

The second shock was to discover that the new Roy of the Rovers was 'Delroy' of the Rovers, a ragamuffin who plays for Nigeria.

"Delroy of the Rovers" ran the headline in the tabloid newspapers at the time.

The comic strip was very committed to the Kick Racism Out of Football Campaign and I designed posters for the campaign featuring Delroy and Rocky. The strip itself never shied away from dealing with issues of racism in the game

Third shock was to discover that his son, Rocky, has turned into a cocky little brat (this shock happens to most parents of course). Rocky is also in the Melchester team now, but it turns out he's not exactly a chip off the old block. He doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good as his dad was, he's grumpy, opinionated, self centred and ends up in fights, walking out of the club and even taking ecstasy. A whole new meaning to Racey's rocket.

As you can see from these pages, which show Rocky wondering around Melchester Rec in solipsistic mode, the story telling is often concerned as much with a face in the a Melchester Rovers' crowd or 'off the field' affairs as it is with the action on the pitch (a relegation battle of course!).

Rocky's attempts to escape football prove fruitless as he finds himself watching a kids game and standing next to a life long Rovers' fan

Contrasting the northern skies ("through the wind and the rain") with the shared warmth of the football crowd and the sunshine of cup success and the open top bus.

The top image shows the end of 'Grandad' Roy's career with a knee injury. (see below)

Much of what we did was disregarded by later revamps of the strip. Stuart wanted to be able to write about the history of Roy, but it was so ridiculous it undermined the whole sense of realism he was aiming for (for example Roy had been playing in the top flight for 40 years!). Some retconning was required. Roy's career was split in two and the early years were attributed to Roy's father. So we had a Roy Race dynasty.

Three generations of Race - Grandfather, Father and son. This was a cover image featuring a cigarette card, bubble gum card and Panini sticker for each generation.

I tried to give each one an 'era' face - a fifties face a seventies face and a nineties face

Grandad Roy - a reinterpretation of the Joe Colquhoun era, again I'm most proud of how fifties he looks - footballers don't look like this anymore. I don't just mean the kit I mean the man himself.

Amusing bit of retcon here - Thanks to Roy Race England qualify for the 1978 World Cup

Flashbacks were a regular storytelling device in the monthly and I relished switching between eras often using different materials to depict a different time. This oil pastel and pencil stuff was for the dark theaters inside the old man's head - the only place for replaying games from a time before TV.

'Grandad' Roy in action as remembered by the ol' fella in the park

I went a bit over the top with some of seventies flashback scenes. Hand painting seventies designs as panel borders with gouache was never a good idea. And there's some dodgy drawing going on here...

An early experiment with flashbacks from issue 1

Another twist was having Melchester Rovers playing real teams with real players (albeit with the names changed). Here's Rocky battling with Bryan Figgs (okay, I made that one up! You get the idea).

Another cover image

The strip also ran simultaneously in Shoot magazine as a two page spread every week (Shoot was selling 120,000 a week in those days, hard to believe now). I took on the drawing duties there and the monthly strip alternated between artists. After a couple of years Fleetway had had enough of our antics and pulled the plug.

A strip from Shoot - this is a reserve game with Rocky's arch rival, Johnny Dexter encouraging Rocky's eventual replacement to impress

Another Shoot strip - this one features real Liverpool players. (Colours by Geraint Ford)

I never had any intention or ambition to draw football comics, but I'm glad I did it. Prior to Glory Glory I had been producing the psychedelic small press comic SLANG* with Sean Longcroft. Essentially I went from doing this:

Psychederek goes down to sign on

To this:

The Melchester defence is unhinged by Keegan's Newcastle

I'm quite proud of what Stuart and I did with Roy of the Rovers**, there's been nothing quite like it before or since, although it may have been more appreciated if it had been football comics in general rather than one of the great icons of British comics that we were so gleefully deconstructing.

*I'll put together another monster blog about SLANG comic at some point...

**Other artists who worked on the strip included Sean Longcroft, Gerraint Ford, Gary Marshall and David Jukes.

RAAAAHH!!

Finished my latest HUZZAH this morning, here's a panel from it. Inked in Manga Studio. Like many comic artists I'm never content with my inks so I was eager to try out this software. Gave me the opportunity to try some wild brushwork on this strip which suits the action sequences. looking forward to using it on Dinlos in the coming weeks as it should speed up the pages and stop me fiddling endlessly in photoshop. Watch this space.

Robots, witches and babies

Two more Huzzah pages done since I returned from holiday - this orange page was done whilst still suffering nausea from a stomach bug, which I think helped the look of the page. The idea was to do something tormented and over powering as the grief-stricken Hexen Definitive* realises her baby that she thought was dead is in fact alive and has been hidden from her all this time. 

With all that emotion in mind I left the page looking rough as hell to give it that cry-your-heart-out look. Feeling nauseous helped me realise how such news would knock her world spinning into the void. I guess the spiral staircase is a classic surrealistic device for achieving a sense of vertigo and disorientation, and the fellow with crescent-shaped head also seems to belong in some surreal nightmare/nursery rhyme. I'd love to say that I planned all this, but the truth is I just spent a few feverish hours scrawling away in photoshop and ended up with the whole thing virtually finished.

By contrast this second page shows a clearer head. I've simplified the colour again - I like to use colour for atmosphere and emotional impact rather than use it for 'realistic' description or decorative effect. At least that's how I feel at the moment. Here the whole thing's meant to look subterranean and unnatural. I ended up with a kind of formaldehyde-tank-in-the-night-museum look. 

This page was also a case of going back and reintroducing ideas from the very beginning of the story. The infant first mentioned on Page 2 is revealed. It appears that the Glass Tsar has two heirs - a natural heir and a very unnatural heir that lurks in a pit deep below the surface of Voldar.

I knew I was going to do a reveal of the infant on this page and went through numerous monstrous variations on the Glamis Castle Monster theme. In the end I decided it would be scariest if the creature that lurks in the dark, eating people, actually looked like a... baby.

*At least that's what I'm calling her. Name borrowed from Mark E Smith.

Baron Kazam takes off

Here's my latest HUZZAH!! (above and below). It's really rattling along now. Faz Choudhury is next up, can't wait to see how he follows this! I'll be away for a week, so it'll be fascinating to see where HUZZAH!! is by the time I get back. 

As requested by Paul Harrison Davies  here's a 'how it's done in 3 easy steps' thing. Prior to the first stage I would have done a thumbnail on a piece of paper - no idea where that went, I'm surrounded by mountains of paper as I'm in the middle of a couple of projects.

I always paste the plate that proceeds mine onto my page (in this case Dave Taylor's revelation of a baby in a sphere inside Xog)) so I'm working as if it is part of the same page.

Until I come up with a better solution I'm inking in Photoshop. My Huzzah plate on page 7 was done with pen and paper, but all the rest have been done like this. It's handy when you change your mind as often as I do

I wanted to use limited flat colours but also wanted to stick to Dave's palette to keep the continuity on the page, so I stopped the line work and messed about until I came up with this Mondrian looking colour layout. Also the muted colour and the dreamy motion of the page worked as a great contrast to the dazzling colours in the next panel (top of this post) where the Baron hurtles in the air clinging to the remote womb. Actually I did that big magenta flying baron image first and tried to work towards it. I'm really not the most methodical of people.

Michael Charlton Exhibition

Avid followers of this blog (yes, both of you) will remember the tribute I wrote for Michael Charlton, who died last year; this week his his son William has contacted me to let me know about a retrospective exhibition of Mike's work to be held at Salisbury Art Centre from Feb 25th to march 14th. I urge anyone who can make it to get over to Salisbury and see Mike's illustrations. I realise that for some people this is impossible so here are a couple more examples so you can see what you're missing.

The Christmas box

The Xmas box is a real favourite of mine. Mike often saved his most adventurous experiments for his own projects and his annual project was to create an original approach to the christmas card. This is a 1950s experiment where instead of a card Mike produced a box with himself, his first wife Irene and children, Nick, Ruth, William and Cathy given a side each. I believe it's print from a lino cut. The mind boggles at the amount of work that must have gone into making these. And yet he's ended up with something that has a bold design alongside Mike's lightness of touch and the warmth of his humour. Great isn't it.

Here are some more:

The Toff-o-lux chewer

The man himself with trademark pipe and pencil

This is typical of his later work for Bodley Head and Hodder and Stoughton

and this is just fab!

The Old Man's Back Again

Baron Kazam

The Old Man's Back Again has become a sort of theme tune for Baron Kazam, I end up humming it every time I see him. It's one of those booming, mythic, Sergio Leone landscape sounding Scott Walker songs (I could just have easily chosen The Seventh Seal by Scott Walker, I guess. That one even features a knight). 

From page one of The Inverted Coma

Always annoying when folk don't update their blogs and I'm getting a bit slack myself just now thanks to my mountainous workload. So, with that in mind, and the fact I'm going to be flat out busy for another fortnight before I go on holiday, I thought I'd do some bumper blogging! The indian pic is a panel from the Future Shock type thing that I've been kicking around for the past couple of years. Thought I ought to finish it and send it over to Tharg really. 

Below is one of those "how to in 3 quick easy steps" things. I couldn't resist jumping in and nudging the HUZZAH story on the other day and managed to knock out three panels in double quick time.

Jedi Academy

Doing HUZZAH has reminded me of my last foray into Space Opera when I produced 4 issues of Jedi Academy for Lucasfilms and Deagostini a few years back. Sadly the project went tits thanks to packaging issues and inflatable chairs that didn't inflate (merchadise) and so it only had trial distribution (which is where the publishers choose a few selected cities for a dry run). It was aimed at the kiddies (the younglings!?!?) and followed the jolly japes of four padwans as they go through their jedi training.

Here comes the knight

Have no fear, Zhadira, back up is on its way! Or not. 

This is my latest HUZZAH!! page. I wanted to introduce Baron Kazam at some point and this seemed like a good place for us to find him. The Baron leapt into my mind as soon as we started HUZZAH, he seems very familiar. I like that, he triggers all sorts of associations in my head - Don Quixote, Flash Gordon, Arzach, Dan Dare, Baron Munchausen etc etc - a kind of conglomeration of 30's sci fi, 70s fantasy and chivalric romance. I can't say too much in case I bias my fellow HUZZAHers, because who he is and what he does will be as much down to them as it is to me. He seems to be light years away from Zhadira and her problems at the moment, I quite like that.

I went for a bright, flat coloured look, something with a pulp sci fi comic feel. Even the aliens look a bit 1950s in places. The fight booth is based on Ron Taylor's Boxing Booth that appears at the Dorset Steam Fair every year. 

BIFF! BANG! POW!

Here's a big old rumpus from my latest HUZZAH!! plate. Seems like Zhadira's not too keen on being 'mapped'. The first 6 full pages of the story are here to read.

So far HUZZAH!! seems fairly coherent to me, I hope that's the case for anyone stumbling upon it on their web travels. Although it's essentially a game I can't help but want to make the whole thing make sense. I thought I'd be spilling my brains into it with dada-esque abandon, using HUZZAH!! as something to catch the overflow, instead I'm busying about like my Nan tidying up loose ends and keeping everything just-so. I guess my overriding  motivation in life is 'story' - I want to find out what the story is and pass it on. I'm really enjoying my part in HUZZAH!! I hope it's as much fun for anyone reading along with us as it is to make.

Here's my other plate. (Look at me tidying things away!) I guess the trick from a writing point of view with HUZZAH!! is knowing when to tidy up loose ends and when to leave them dangling (FNARR FNARR!). It's the difference between a loose end and a hook.

Doctor Who Adventures

Just to let you know my Doctor Who monsters start appearing in the latest issue of Doctor Who Adventures magazine No. 97 (I think it's Pat Troughton being chased by a Yeti, haven't seen it yet).  The page above is from Time of My Life, a story I drew for Doctor Who Magazine last year. I couldn't find anything more appropriate and this DWA stuff is for THE BBC so if put the artwork up I'll be sent straight to the Tower of London.

13/1/09 Just picked up a copy of DWA 97 and discovered that these are part of "Terror Through Time" series of A4 cut out and keep pages. I was particularly surprised about the size as I only drew them about 7 cm high. Mind you, I'm rather chuffed with them. And my kids will be even chuffeder.

The Family Pet

Back to Dinlos - this is another panel from Family pet. I've had a bit of head scratching session over this because the artwork is getting more and more complex and I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. 

Perhaps some of the other stories will lend themselves to a quicker more cartoony style. Family Pet is supposed to have a bit of Gothic Horror about its everyday tale of a girl and her pet.

A New Dredd Movie?!

My first 'proper' Dredd done in 1992

Yes, that's right folks they're planning another one! I remember the last one only too well (I wish I didn't!). In those days I knew Jock (who's designing the new movie) as a wee laddie who used to hang around the comic shop in Salisbury (Floppy Tongue) - I had recently lost my job after Roy of the Rovers collapsed (suspected hamstring). 

I worked on the comic spin-off from the movie - Judge Dredd Lawman of The Future. The idea was to make it more kid-friendly, something I was all in favour of (in fact, I still think it's a shame that when 2000ad drifted so far towards adult comics there was nothing to fill the void - the first 400 issues are still my 2000ad era), sadly Lawman of the Future became an attempt to make a non-violent Judge Dredd comic - which is like having non-wet water.

Another early sample (With Judge Death) and some

Lawman of the Future art - note Dredd's redesigned uniform (Gah!)

On the whole my artwork for the project was ropey as hell and heavily influenced my my hero Mick (in those days Mike) McMahon. Many of the artists and writers moved on to work for the megazine and 2000ad, I decided I wasn't good enough, or perhaps more to the point I just didn't have the will to make myself good enough for that kind of work. 2000ad itself had became very painterly and self indulgent in those days (like an acrylic convention for fans of Frank Frazetta fans) and so I went off to do 'funny' comics instead. It's interesting to note that 2000ad reverted to more traditional virtues like storytelling, and recent stories like Stickleback are every bit as good the stories from its heyday.

Last time they made a movie of Dredd I came out of it feeling like I just sat and watched someone giving my granny a kicking for two hours. This time around Dredd is more like a distant Uncle so I probably won't be so mortified even if they do give him another seeing to. Mind you, I'd rather they just let him keep his helmet on this time and made mega city look like the spaghetti street, pepper pot land that Mick McMahon drew, where people wore giant rabbit shoes and mushroom hats. Maybe that's just me showing my age.

Mick McMahon shows how it's done!

This is how Mega City will always look to me

Having said that, Jock is a sickeningly talented young fellow with a wonderful grasp of Dredd and his world so I reckon he'll make sure we get the real deal this time. Best of luck, Jock.

(Actually I must also give a mention to my fellow HUZZAHer, Dave Taylor, who is already well known to people who haven't had their heads in the sand like me, but whose work I'm just discovering. And he has a fantastical take on Mega City that avoids the predictable dark and indiscernible, Bladerunner-in-the-fog look that saves the artist time but makes Mega City seem like any other futropolis. Dave's is a beautiful Mega City that people live in.  I never understood the desire to have gothic shadowy cities that look nice in pictures or on film, but don't look like anyone would ever live in. What's a city without people?)